What if curriculum.pdf

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What If Curriculum (of a Certain Kind)Doesnt Matter?

A review of

Curriculum Policy and the Politics of What Should Be Learned in Schools(Benjamin Levin. Chapter 1, pp. 724.)

Curriculum Planning: Content, Form, and the Politics of Accountability(Michael W. Apple. Chapter 2, pp. 2544.)

Making Curricula: Why Do States Make Curricula, and How?(Ian Westbury. Chapter 3, pp. 4565.)

Subject Matter: Defining and Theorizing School Subjects(Zongyi Deng & Allan Luke. Chapter 4, pp. 6689.)

inPart I, Section A: Making Curriculum

The SAGE Handbook of Curriculum and Instruction, edited byF. M. Connelly, M. F. He, & J. I. Phillion, Sage Publications, 2008

Reviewed by

KENT DEN HEYER

University of AlbertaEdmonton, Alberta, Canada

I should begin by acknowledging that all four essays in The SAGE Handbooksection Making Curriculum take readers through remarkably large swathsof research related to the politically invested terrain of curriculum making.Michael Apple, for example, in his chapter, entitled Curriculum Planning:

Content, Form, and the Politics of Accountability, reviews research thatilluminate[s] the relations between curricula and power (p. 25) and theimportance of social movements influencing such relations. He also citesresearch investigating the situated qualities of curriculum planning, dis-tribution, and reception (p. 27) as they relate, for example, to textbooks aspolitical-cultural products. In doing so, he details the ways such distributionand reception involve a complex articulation of social movements,

2009 by The Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto.

Curriculum Inquiry 39:1 (2009)

Published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc., 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA, and 9600 Garsington Road,

Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK

doi: 10.1111/j.1467-873X.2008.01435.x


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class and economic relations, regional conflicts, and a heavy dose of racialfears and gender hierarchies (p. 27). Given the substantial research alsocovered by Ben Levin, Ian Westbury, and Zongyi Deng and Allan Luke, the

challenge I face in this review is to single out a necessarily limited track.While it will fail to do justice to any of these essays, I decided on thefollowing approach.

I read the four essays I was assigned and re-read John Deweys TheEducational Situation: As Concerns the Elementary School (2001) asinvited to do so by Westbury in his introductory essay of this Handbooksection. To gain perspective on the curricular terrain these scholars review,I read each of these essays alongside Jacques Rancire (1991) and various

works by Alain Badiou (2000, 2001, 2005). While their oeuvres differ,Rancire and Badiou can be reasonably summarized as writing in defense

of peoples capacity to willfully exercise their own intelligence (Rancire,1991) and potential for becoming subject to their own truth-processes(Badiou, 2001) independently of both institutionalized life and curricularplans.

This approach revealed two contrasting orientations to the knowledge,truth, and politics behind two equally distinct interpretations of the rel-evance of various actors and sites involved in the making of curriculum. Inthese Handbookessays, the authors map the corporate negotiations of cur-riculum as a formal program of studies between sociologically definedgroups and movements (Apple), professionally interested groups (Deng &Luke), politically motivated representatives (Levin), and all the above

(Westbury). As I interpret their work, in their review of what they deemrelevant research to the questions around making curriculum, all authorstake up truth as being reproduced from generation to generation byspecific knowledge heritages (Westbury, p. 48). The politics of curricu-lum makingpolitics interpreted as a question of who gets what? (Levin,p. 8; Apple)involves each group struggling to have its forms of knowingor knowledge-as-inherited-truth promulgated in the next formal curricu-lum text.

Against the notion detailed by each of these Handbook authors thatpolitics involves the plurality of opinions regulated by a cultural norm,

Badiou (2005) asserts that [t]he essence of politics . . . is a rupture withwhat exists (p. 24). In this reading, politics ruptures the commonplaceinterpretations of the properly political. Rather than negotiations of inter-ests and opinions, politics begins with statements of axiomatic truth for

which existing frames of political debate cannot contain (Barbour, inpress). For Rancire (1991), one such axiom is that ofequality, which heposits is not an ideal to achieve, but is rather the incontestable, axiomaticcondition of any democratic political statement or situation worthy of thename (Barbour, in press). As explored throughout, equality is exactly theaxiomatic democratic and political condition for which state schools and itscurriculum cannot, indeed, must not, take account.

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If one interprets truth as nothing more than the historical property ofthis or that social grouping, then indeed the politics of making curriculumas reviewed in these essays is nothing more than a battlefield upon which

differently defined groups fight to extend their conflicting claims into themind of the abstracted Child. But what if we interpret truth or rathertruth-processes (Badiou, 2001) in relation to knowledge, politics, andcurriculum differently? I juxtapose this review of these Handbookessays intomy exploration of a different curricular question, how best to arrangeknowledge so as to increase the likelihood that a teacher and student canengage in truth-processes. This question speaks to the more affirmativepresumption of equality-of-all in relation to truth, knowledge, andpolitics than found in the research reviewed here.

The essays by Apple, Levin, and Westbury should be required reading

for anyone betting hope for a better future (in schools or elsewhere) on themaking of curriculum-as-formal-text. Levin, in his chapter, CurriculumPolicy and the Politics of What Should Be Learned in Schools, offers aninsiders account of the complexities faced by political actors involved innegotiating a program of studies. His account provides readers with aconcise and detailed overview of the processes and partisan pressures insuch negotiations. As an example of such pressure, Levin cites a ruleexpressed by a politician concerning public issues in which people areassumed to be not interested: If I cant explain it in 25 words or less,people stop listening (p. 10). In this chapter, Levin offers little reflectionabout this or other issues he documents: about whether, for example, (1)

such cynicism is itself a reason not to listen; or (2) where the sources of thisassumed pressure actually lie; or (3) whether the content of the 25 wordsdeserve nothing more from a reasonably intelligent public.

In his chapter, entitled Making Curricula, Why Do States Make Cur-ricula and, How?, Westbury extends analysis beyond the formal politicscovered by Levin to map the expectations and actions of a wide range ofactorsfrom state representatives to curriculum reformers. He provides asynthesis of research that, in addition to other findings, leads Westbury toconclude that formal curriculum innovation has little impact on class-room practices. While words like innovation and change are often

attached to curricula, Westbury sees the processes of formal curriculummaking as a mechanism, or tool . . . more often than not designedto mute rather than amplify calls for educational reform and change(p. 61).

Deng and Luke in their essay, Subject Matter: Defining and TheorizingSchool Subjects, offer a nuanced exploration of the differing traditions

vertically through time (i.e., from Aristotle to Comte to Dewey) and hori-zontally across differing frames for categorizing subject matter as distinc-tively educational means and ends (p. 67). This horizontal framingconcerns the shape, purpose, and enactment of subject matter as inter-preted by curricular theorists ranging from Ralph Tyler and Dewey to

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disciplinarians like Jerome Bruner and those in-between such as LeeShulman. Deng and Luke begin and end by arguing that curriculum theoryoffers the only possible grounding for curriculum making despite the

increasing tendency of curriculum policy makers and bureaucrats toproceed without, and in cases deliberately in the face of, curriculumtheory (p. 67). Agreeing with their assertion of theorys importance forpractice, let me identify and answer two foundational questions at the heartof the enterprise of institutionalized curriculum and enforced schoolingbefore returning to these essays.

As is often the case, the foundational questions at the heart of ourshared lives are as much the ones we do not ask as they are the ones wedo. The foundational question of curriculum is not just what shouldcount as knowledge (Deng & Luke, p. 71) or its corollary whose knowl-

edge is worth knowing? (Apple, p. 35). It is as much, what is (and whois) not worth knowing? An answer to this foundational curricular questionis this: Nothing and no one. Nothing and no one can be said a priori tobe not worth knowing for all young people who live within a political

jurisdiction.An answer to the more commonly asked curricular questionwhat is

worth knowing?is this: That I can learn anything I wish to the degree Iapply my intelligence and will within the circumstances that chance pro-

vides (Rancire, 1991). I did so when I learned to speak, ride a bike, playguitar, made games with an old wheel, and made friends in the park and onthe street. This is not to say people did not help out, but rather to empha-

size that I learned these things fundamentally because I was driven to do soand without compulsion from the State or the school. Let us call these twoanswers (that nothing/no one can be said a priori to not be worth knowingand the necessity of self-directing) the void that our contemporary stateof schooling must avoid acknowledging (Badiou, 2001; den Heyer, inpress).1 Each of the Handbookauthors fails to sufficiently acknowledge, letalone address, this void. This is understandable.

To acknowledge this void risks the legitimacy of claims that statecurriculum, schools, and we, as accredited educators, exist primarily for thegood of the child. As I explore in greater detail farther below, institution-

alized curriculum and pedagogy can only proceed by the positing of aninequalitythe childs deficit or lack, and by extension, their families andcommunitiesthat its agents then appoint themselves, indeed, are certi-fied, to study and rectify.

An analogy helps to see the logic at work at the center of contemporarycurriculum making as reported (although not necessarily supported) inthese Handbookessays: Let us put all the young birds into a cage and thenexplain to them how to fly. We will break down this process into consum-able chunks and then test their consumption according to schedule. At theend of this, students will be accredited to fly. Or, let us design lessonsdifferently and justify our reasoning on the grounds that either the young,

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disciplinary communities or the social order needs it to be so. Thus, pro-gressives and conservatives engage in education debate:

And, by the time [the progressives] ideals and theories had been translated overinto their working equivalents in the curriculum, the difference between them andwhat he as a conservative really wished and practiced became often the simpledifference of tweedle dum from tweedle dee. So, the great big battle was foughtwith mutual satisfaction, each side [conservative and progressive] having an almostcomplete victory in its own field. (Dewey, 2001, p. 388)

We also might debate where they ought to fly someday. Within this frame,however, the cage remains a given in which [a]lmost of necessity . . . per-sonal appropriation, assimilation and expression is incidental and superfi-

cial (Dewey, 2001, p. 395). Anyone questioning the necessity of the cage islikely to be deemed crazy (and thus, following Badiou and Rancire, likelyengaged in a politics worthy of the name). The people convinced that the

young birds will never learn to fly without their directives are bureaucratsor ideologues in various institutional guises. Regardless of what curriculumemerges from the curriculum debate detailed in these Handbookchapters,a tragic school lesson is being learned.

Within the cage, each young person (now cast in social drama as astudent) will come to believe some version of the following: that my willto attend to the infinite learning possibilities that life presents is of noconsequence; that I must have others explain to me what I should know;

that I cannot claim to know unless I reproduce what was explained to mein a form recognizable to the explicator (Rancire, 1991); and that, even

when the truth appears to be the opposite, the explicator has my bestinterests at heart. This is the logic that must be accepted, acquiesced to, orforced from the populace by all forms of enforced state schooling thatconflate learning with accreditation (Illich, 1971; for interpretations of the

ways that this conflation in schooling serves empire, see Willinsky, 1998;den Heyer, 2005). This logic of deficit requires, as Dewey (2001) notes,personal appropriation, assimilation and expression to be incidentaland superficial (p. 395). Working out of this logic, the questions and

responses surrounding curriculum making then appear to be nothingmore than an obviously requiredthat is, naturalsocial language(Bakhtin, 1986). These essays diligently map the political dynamiccreated by this logic as it plays out in multiple social sites.

Avoiding the void and facing crowded Monday classrooms of theinterred young, we can now turn back to the operative questionthe oneexerting force and power in present situationsas opposed to the founda-tional questionsthose that return us to the heart of the matterof cur-riculum making as interpreted in these essays: How do competing groupsmake every student in the jurisdiction learn what we want to them tolearn and measure that learning most efficiently? The negotiated result is

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often, to speak plainly, absurd. One of the many examples of formalcurricula offered in the chapters will suffice; Nova Scotias one course on

Atlantic Canada in the Global Community has 30 student curriculum out-

comes for this one course alone for a single Grade 9 school year! And whileDeng and Luke conclude that there is a strong, almost anachronistic movetoward a reassertion of the doctrine of disciplinaritywith university deans,professors, public intellectuals increasingly involved in bids to control andname the contents of science, mathematics, and other school subjects (p.83), I must ask, but what does it matter?

As Westbury and Apple emphasize, formal curricula has little discern-able effect on changing classroom practices. Negotiations over formal cur-ricula turn, rather, on the claims by interested social groups over thecurriculum as a social imaginary:

Each group believes that its form of discourse and its world is the reality of theproject [of curriculum design/or program of studies] and that the means and endsnamed by [their] symbols [and symbol making] are what the symbolic action isabout. (Haft & Hopmann, cited in Westbury, p. 57)

What we learn from Apple, Levin, and Westbury about such negotiationswill likely not surprise many readers of this journal. Rather than workfrom or in relation to the void at the heart of enforced schooling (i.e.,

What is not worth knowing?) or the gesture of omnipotence that is pre-sumed to have all youth learn what some we want them to, I conclude

from these essays that curriculum making is, rather, a corporate affairthat proceeds under the sign for the good of the child. The givens aregiventhe cage, the good it is assume to serve, and the child to whomthe good is servedand negotiations proceed as a parley between inter-ested units over the given. Each of these essays detail the lack of disin-terested interest (Badiou, 2001) at the table and in the negotiatedcurricula that emerge. In short, I conclude that the bargains these schol-ars document are born out of a profound cynicism about human poten-tial for self-direction:

On the side of the machinery of school-work, I mention first the number of children

in a room. This runs in the graded schools of our country anywhere from3560. . . . Under such circumstances, how do we have the face to continue to speakat all of the complete development of the individual as the supreme end of educa-tional effort? (Dewey, 2001, p. 394)

Of course, this is not to suggest that both conservatives and progressivesas reviewed in these chapters lack good intentions or honourable aspira-tions. In the case of the latter, they just seem to misread what the point isof curriculum making.

As Westbury cites several research cases to note, curriculum reformersoften fail because they thought curriculum making was an educational

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projectthat is, an activity and process directed at the improvement orenhancement of schooling (p. 52). Such an assumption indicates thatthese reformers do not . . . understand curricula, curriculum making, and

curriculum policy making realistically (p. 52). And about what are thesenegotiations concerned? As Westbury concludes, in the social context (incontrast to the instructional or programmatic context) the debatesthemselves and their resolutions yield frameworks for narratives about therole education and schooling as ideas play in a social and cultural order(p. 49). Apple also asserts that the establishments of standards in curriculaare unlikely to fulfill their proponents intentions. Rather they are oftensymbolic accomplishments (Placier, Walker, & Foster, cited in Apple,p. 28). As he summarizes, [u]ltimately, the standards became a form ofsymbolic politics, signaling that something was being done but having little

transformative potential (p. 28). In short, curriculum change constitutesa status quo construct to appear innovative while working to block any realchange:

[Curriculum making] is a mechanism, or tool, deployed to manage the political,professional, and public fields around schooling, more often than not designedto mute rather than amplify calls for educational reform and change. (Westbury,p. 61)

I agree with Apple, Westbury, and others here. Curriculum making isindeed symbolic politics involving acts of ideological compromise and

political consensus (Deng & Luke, p. 82) between conservatives andprogressives. The real impacting conditions of schoolsconcerningthe cage and its presumed necessitynot only remain unaddressed. As thereal effect of such symbolic politics, such conditions are made even moreinvisible/unquestionable by these debates.

Levin deploys Edelmans condensation symbols to interpret whycertain events become catalysts for debates over curriculum. Condensationsymbols can be even small events which become highly symbolic as theyseem to embody, or condense, a range of beliefs and values in a particularcase (Levin, p. 19). In the context of curriculum making, they cause panics

about what students are or are failing to learn. They constitute, therefore,catalysts activating interested social groups into negotiated conflict. Inthese conflicts, the panic works to foreclose any potential challenge to, orquestioning of, the necessity of the cage. Levin expresses the interpretationof politics behind such a situation, Political processes are driven by inter-ests, and particularly by the most vocal interests. Finding ways to mediateinterests through different processes and uses of evidence will remain achallenge, though one worth pursuing (p. 22). As Levin further notes,[e]ven expert processes are susceptible to a preference for interest bar-gaining instead of evidence (p. 19). In other words, incited into debate byparticular condensation symbols, curriculum as a formal program of

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studies emerges from corporatist negotiations where even evidenceserves self-interest (Saul, 1995).

John Ralston Saul (1995) asserts that the only views that count in a

corporatist society do so because they are expressed by representatives of acorporate entity. In place of the democratic ideal of citizens, we haverepresentatives of corporations that include professional expert groups

who accept the cover charge to be included in these supposed politicaldebates. The process of curriculum making documented in these chaptersshould raise serious concerns that, rather like putting too many crackers ina bowl of soup, a social situation whose knowledge of itself consists ofself-interest will soak up and dehydrate any sense of common wealth orpublic purpose. It should also lead to questions concerning causation asrelates to public policy about education.

For example, Deng and Luke assert that recent government policy tofocus on the production ofnew scientific expertisefor globalized, knowledgeeconomies economy has led to calls for changes in science curriculum . . .spurred by international comparative studies of student achievement (p.66; emphases added). I suspect that in our corporatist situationwhereinterest bargaining as much as evidence dominatesthat cause andeffect are not so easily attributable or related to each other as these authorsassert.

Whatever its cause, purpose, or intent, the curriculum as a formal textmight serve classroom learning if it were itself positioned as a historicallycurious artifact for student analysis (what I have outlined elsewhere as the

curriculum as the curriculum [den Heyer, 2008]). Doing so, the detailedanalysis of curriculum making studied by Deng and Luke, Levin, and

Westbury might tell youth much about the exclusions that seem inherent tosuch negotiations aptly outlined by Apple (and consequently, the need forsomething grander in which to believe and pursue). But this would be toenter a debate about curriculum as reviewed in these chapters as if itmattered, and I want to suggest here the opposite: What if curriculum as aformal text doesnt matter?

ON AVOIDING NAILING KIDS TO THE CROSS OF OURMISSIONARY IMPERATIVES

Given the capacity of youth to read the situations of adults, we should notbe surprised that the cynicism of a corporatist society as briefly reviewedabove (i.e., If I cant explain it in 25 words or less, people stop listening)has an analogue of despair in classrooms.2 Cynicism and despair areencouraged in these sites of social life by two mutually supporting andpersuasive logics.

The first logic concerns the need to be self-interested about publicquestions such as formal curriculum. These Handbookauthors provide the

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reader with refined analyses of how this logic plays out across a range ofcorporate sites. The second logic is shared by both those who support andthose who advocate against present practices in schooling systems (in

Deweys terms, conservatives and progressives); a logic of deficit depos-ited in the lives of others, which we as bureaucrats, scholars, and teachersthen take as our mission to rectify. Each of these entwined logics maintainsthe present status quo from becoming otherwise: a present situation thatDavid Geoffrey Smith (2000) describes as frozen futurism. Let me turn tooutline this second logic further.

In defense of human capacities to exercise intelligence and affirmativelyinvent realities, both Rancire and Badiou dismiss sociology and a scienceof pedagogy as practices premised on the institutionalization of inequalityand deficit reasoning. In Rancires critique of Bourdieus sociology, for

example, we can easily recognize a challenge to pedagogics (Dewey, 2001,p. 398). Both sociology and pedagogics divide the world into two: theknowing and the ignorant, the mature and the uninformed, the capableand the incapable who, in turn, require new scientific knowledge capableof illuminating and criticizing the overwhelming illusions in which every-one is imprisoned (Ross, 1991, p. xi). In each case, the operative principleof the enterprise must be the naturalizing objectification of the other sothat each can legitimate its specificity as a science (Ross, 1991, p. xii).Borrowing from Rancire, and as outlined by his translator, Kristin Ross,that principlereferred to as the Bourdieu effectmay be summarized

with the following tautology:

[Working-class youth] are excluded because they dont know why they areexcluded; and they dont know why they are excluded because they are excluded.. . . By rehearsing this tautology, the sociologist placed himself in the position ofeternal denouncer of a system granted the ability to hide itself forever from itsagents: not only did the sociologist see what teacher (and student) did not, he sawit because the teacher and student could not. (Ross, 1991, pp. xixii; emphasisoriginal)

Thus posited, we take up the inequality of others as our cause to solve:

By beginning with inequality, [each] proves it, and proving it, in the end, is obligedto rediscover it again and again. Whether school is seen as the reproduction ofinequality (Bourdieu) or as the potential instrument for the reduction of inequality,the effect is the same: that of erecting and maintaining the distance separating afuture reconciliation from a present inequality, a knowledge in the offing fromtodays intellectual impoverishmenta distance discursively invented and rein-vented so that it may never be abolished. (Ross, 1991, p. xix)

Such entwined logicsof self-interested negotiations between parties overthe given and the necessity that the given always be given as lacking what onlymore school and a better curriculum can rectifyexemplify our situation or

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state of frozen futurism. As applies to curriculum making as formal text,this is a state in which what was expected to be revealed hasbeen revealed,and that what the revelation discloses is that the future will always be more of

this, a perpetual unfolding of more and more of this (Smith, 2000, p. 17).Smith does not believe that the present-future is in fact frozen, only a

particular understanding of it (p. 15). He calls for an education torecover a future that truly is a future; that is, a condition that is actuallyopen:

Is there a way of living Now that could address the futility of frozen futurism whilehonouring the truth of human aspiration and dreaming; a way of living Now. . . without giving up the possibility of continual regeneration through our mutualencounter? (Smith, 2000, pp. 1819)

In response to Smiths question, we must emphatically answer, Yes! A firststep on the way requires that educators reject the inherited missionarystance of our vocation so as to avoid nailing kids to the imperatives derivedfrom the logics outlined above.

A first step in this regard in my own work concerns thinking throughthe implications of Badious (2005) claim that education . . . has nevermeant anything but this: to arrange the forms of knowledge in such a waythat some truth may come to pierce a hole in them (p. 9). While limitedby space, let me briefly outline the key relationship between knowledge andtruth as it relates to encounters between teacher and students. In doing so,

I follow in agreement, although not in a straight line, with Deng and Lukesassertion that the formation of a school subject requires addressing anarray of fundamental curriculumnot disciplinary questions . . . (p. 73).

In contrast to my interpretation of what is being expressed throughoutthese Handbookchapters, for Badiou (2001), truth is not a social propertybelonging to a particular social group or knowledge heritage. As EtienneBalibar (2004) notes, Badious interpretation of truth bears no resem-blance to that found in Foucaults analysis of relational regimes of power.Nor does his interpretation align with Derridas insistence on the illusorystatus of a truth as a temporalization of idealities (Balibar, 2004, p. 24).

Further, Badious re-conceptualization of truth is unrelated to the idea ofan intellectual dialectic [or] to the idea of self-knowledge (Balibar, 2004,p. 24). Rather, truthinterpreted as a truth-processis instigated by aevent that voids what those thinking within the situation accept asreasonable, sensible, or politically possible and instantiates the possibilityof new possibilities (Badiou, cited in Cho & Lewis, 2005). A truth-processirrupts exactly within such arranged sensibilities and knowledge of thesituation, or what Badiou names as opinion (i.e., Pluto is a planet, boys

will be boys, Canada is a democracy). Love provides the most poignantexample of an event that irrupts within (or pierces a hole in) theopinions we assume define our situations.

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All lovers are subject to both the particular and the universal. Alllovershowever particular the people and the circumstancesarebecoming subject to an eventfalling in lovethat is also universal in

that love-as-event respects no pre-set rules, pre-existing identities orexpectations and, we must assume, is potentially available to all. In additionto other consequences, encountering an event such as love subtracts from(or pierces a hole in) what one thought to be the case of ones situation.This subtraction simultaneously creates the possibilities of a supplement

we enact in becoming more than the one we thought (were opinion-ated)we were. In this case, we break with all previous fictional assemblagesthrough which [we] organized [a] self-representation (Badiou, 2001,p. 55). In short, all lovers constitute a becoming subject by embodying adisinterested interest in inherited opinions. Badiou writes:

I cannot, within the fidelity to fidelity that defines ethical consistency [of, and, to,a truth-process] take an interest in myself, and thus pursue my own interests. All mycapacity for interest, which is my own perseverance in being, has poured outinto thefuture consequences of the solution to this scientific problem, into the examinationof the world in the light of loves being-two, into what I will make of my encounter,one night, with the eternal Hamlet, or into the next stage of the political process,once the gathering in front of the factory has dispersed. There is always only onequestion in the ethic of truths: how will I, as some-one, continue to exceed my ownbeing? How will I link the things I know, in a consistent fashion, via the effects ofbeing seized by the not-known? (Badiou, 2001, p. 50)

The proper verb tense with Badious use of an event, truth-process, and thesituation defined by opinion is neither the present nor the past, but ratherthe future anterior. In essence, a becoming subjectas one faithful to theunpredictable implications of a truth eventdeclares this will have beentrue pursuing exactly what it will be absurd notto have believed (Gibson,2006, p. 88: emphasis added). It is in this pursuit with discipline or fidelityof an events implications that is to be living Now. In response toSmiths question above, this Now is, simultaneously, a future becomingthrough the truth of human aspiration and dreaming. To avoid anyconfusion, it is necessary to be very clear that, for Badiou, becoming

subject is a collective subjectivity entirely dependent on the emergence ofan event. His is not an argument for enlightened free will or for anindividualism that is fully in charge of itself. As with love, the unpredictableconsequences of an event mock such assertions.

As it is with truth and knowledge-opinion, so it might be with teacherand students who, as I believe these Handbookauthors would agree, consti-tute the most relevant site of curriculum making. As Westbury writes in hisintroduction (Curriculum in Practice) to this Handbooksection, It is onlythose at the chalk-face who can make curricula and school subjects thataddress their needs . . . and the demands of the classroom and these (real)students (p. 3). Apple, as another example, also gives this site attention by

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attending to research outlining what he believes to be more humanizingclassroom curriculum and pedagogical strategies (pp. 3940). Taking theirinsights one step farther, however, education begins where the teacher and

student seek to become subject to a truth-process. In maintaining fidelityto such a process, teachers and students are becoming subject to theirlearning and, thus, to their living. In doing so, we potentially constitute acollective becoming subject as is the case when we are seized by anintractable problem, rendered speechless by a moment of invigorating artor when we fall in love.

When we note that philosophyas a founding discipline of theacademe in the Greek-derived traditionsconnotes a love of wisdom, itis appropriate to describe teaching and curriculum as potential sites of anevent that seizes teacher and students into a collective becoming (den

Heyer, in press). In this reading, the subjects of curriculum making andeducation are not, for example, history, language arts, or mathematics.Rather, the proper subject of teachers work is a becoming subject

whose fidelity and discipline is called forth by an event that renders pre-vious and inherited knowledge as insufficient (knowledge however vari-ously framed by experts, as reviewed by Deng and Luke, in Chapter 4 ofthe Handbook).

As the chapters in this Handbook section attest, the perseverance ofbeing of various sociologically defined groups and movements (Apple), ofprofessionally interested groups (Deng & Luke), of politically motivatedrepresentatives (Levin), and of all the above (Westbury), seems to be the

point upon which the present state of curriculum making is run aground.In such a situation, childrens capacities for self-directedness and potentialsto engage in truth-processes are reduced to their sociological properties forthe purposes of research or are read through the lens of competingknowledge-heritages concerned with conscripting new members for theirown good. This will not do.

Educators can supplement the curricular question of what knowledge isworth knowing? with those better given that no one can even say what is notworth knowing in the first place. Following my brief review of Badiou, myfirst candidate as a better curricular question is this: how best to arrange

knowledge so as to increase the likelihood that teachers and students willencounter an event and thus a decision to pursue a truth-process?This question does not deny adults need to dispute the means or ends ofeducation or even whether an education worth the name can occur inschools (after all, if so, I and this essay would be in a bit of an untenableposition). It is rather to better limit the damage of so many self-interestedadults on the affirmative capacities that our young already possess beforethey become the abstracted object of our missionary designs. Against suchdesigns, what might happen if we posit equality into the educational situ-ation; equality of intelligence (Rancire, 1991) and equality of capacity forengaging in truth-processes?

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First, the legitimacy of the cage comes into question. Second, we chal-lenge the Bourdieu effect outlined aboveby beginning with inequality,[each sociologist] proves it, and proving it, in the end, is obliged to redis-

cover it again and again (Ross, 1991, p. xix) through the naturalizingobjectification of the other (Ross, 1991, p. xii). Whose ends does thismissionary stance serve?

To any readers of our work, the insufficiency, if not harm, of assigneddifferences by which the State/situation counts its members and dis-counts others is obvious (i.e., legal and illegal presences). Why, then, is somuch research, as reported by Apple, for example, organized around the

very same categories that serve to further objectify into abstracted socio-logical categories those already obviously objectified by the situation?

What hope lies in such an enterprise? That in the face of Levins insider

reportuses of evidence will remain [a goal] worth pursuingevidence will tear away the illusions under which everyone supposedly isoperating? Only research into curriculum that begins with the premise ofthere being actually existing equality for all, as affirmed by Rancire andBadiou, can we void the entwined logics of self-interest and the deficitthat underpin the missionary stance of the Bourdieu effect. Suchresearch would speak to and for (real) students capacities to engage intruth-processes. In Badious (2001) terms, infinite alterity [or difference]is quite simply what there is (p. 25) and since every truth is the coming-to-be of that which is not yet, so differences then are precisely what truthsdepose, or render insignificant (Badiou, 2001, p. 27). Rather than cur-

riculum interpreted as the delivery of somebody elses mail (be it fromconservatives or progressives) (Pinar, 2004), interpreting truth as thepoint and site of making curriculum potentially provides another socialspace for kids to take a chance and consider what is in light of whatmight become as relates to both the particular and universal of theirpersonal and social situation.

NOTES

1. In speaking for the necessity of self-directing, I do not mean to support inter-pretations of agency as solely residing in the individual or to deny the complexways peoples agency is embedded in social networks. Indeed, most of my schol-arship is concerned with challenging historical, sociological, and educationalwork that assumes such an American middle-class and gender-specific model ofagency in explanations for social action (see den Heyer, 2003; and den Heyer &Fidyk, 2007). However, in the context of research reviewed in these essays, I feelcompelled to speak up for childrens capacities in this regard.

2. See, for example, studies into the differences between students preferablefuture in contrast to what they expect as the probable future in Eckersley(1999), Hicks (2004), and Hutchinson (1996).

39WHAT IF . . .


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REFERENCES

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Emerson and M. Holquist, Eds.). Austin: University of Texas Press.Balibar, E. (2004). The history of truth: Alain Badiou in French philosophy. In P.

Hallward (Ed.), Think again: Alain Badiou and the future of philosophy(pp. 2188).London: Continuum.

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Cho, D., & Lewis, T. (2005). Education and event: Thinking radical pedagogy in theera of standardization. Simile, 5(2). Retrieved August 1, 2008, from http://

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den Heyer, K. (2005). R. Buckminster Fullers Great Pirates: An investigation intonarrative coherency and analysis in world history courses. World History Connected,3(1). Retrieved August 1, 2008, from http://worldhistoryconnected.press.uiuc.edu/3.1/heyer.html

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Eckersley, R. (1999). Dreams and expectations: Young peoples expected and pre-ferred futures and their significance for education. Futures, 31(1), 7390.

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Hutchinson, F. (1996). Educating beyond violent futures. London: Routledge.Illich, I. (1971). Deschooling society. New York: Harper & Row.Pinar, W. F. (2004). What is curriculum theory? Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.Rancire, J. (1991). The ignorant school master: Five lessons in intellectual emancipation

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40 KENT DEN HEYER
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